She Remembers the Anonymity
by vodka straight
Summary: All Zoey Bartlet wants is to get lost in a crowd.


She remembers when her father was governor. She remembers the anonymity.   
  
She used to sit out on her front lawn at three in the morning. She used to sit Indian-style on the wet grass and smoke a cigarette that her boyfriend had bought for her, illegally. She wasn't addicted or anything. Just enjoying her front lawn at night.  
  
She remembers skipping Chemistry and kissing boys in the back of the girls locker room after foundations gym. She wasn't a bad girl. She always had an A. She always had straight A's. But that made it easier not to get in trouble.  
  
She remembers one night when she went to a rock concert with Devin. She remembers that it was a huge, outdoor thing on the side of a hill and there was a stage that they were at least a mile away from, but it was so loud. There were huge amps on all sides and the moon was just a slip in the sky and the air smelled like marijuana and puke. She remembers she looked away for half a second, and Devin was gone. The people moved like one entity, the blood in her veins started hitting her heart to the beat of the music. She saw a woman with her halter top misplaced so that her left breast hung out in the open like nothing, and she was dancing like the hippies in old movies with her eyes closed, pressed against a man with yellow hair and a roach clip in his hand.   
  
The music surged suddenly and she got pushed into a man, expecting to get yelled at or hit on, but neither occurred; he just stayed there, pressed against her, dancing mildly, a middle-aged man with a beard and a hemp necklace who wasn't paying any attention.   
  
Looking back now, she regrets it; she never even thought for a moment that she should call for Devin. That he might have moved through the crowd looking for better seats, or that he was looking for her, too. It never crossed her mind to go after him. She closed her eyes and let herself get pushed around and smiled at the dark and the slip of a moon and the half-naked people all around her, and she remembers a feeling like nothing else she's ever known. It was a lightness in her chest and a ringing emptiness and a nausea that was disorienting and intoxicating without having had a single drink.   
  
It was almost midnight before Devin ever found her. He dragged her back to the parking lot and yelled at her in front of the white station wagon his mother let him borrow for the forty-five minute drive out of town. He yelled, and cried, asked her if she even thought about him at all, because he thought about her every minute of every day.   
  
They broke up. She didn't mind. It was obvious enough that it didn't matter, one way or the other. She was sixteen and ready for a shift, and they were both a little high anyway. And Zoey was still swept up in that ringing emptiness.   
  
The night had been scary, but not like things are now. It hadn't been scary like it is when your personal security agent tells you to please walk on the other side of her and please hurry as you get into the armored car. It hadn't been scary like the aura of five forty-four caliber rifles being hidden on the girls and boys standing around you because there could be anyone in this crowd. Not scary like it is when some woman tries to scale the Whitehouse gate with a gun because she doesn't like the look of you, and because she's crazy and you're the only thing she can see, the only thing she can shoot. Those things are scary like nothing else for Zoey Bartlet.  
  
She doesn't want to think about it, though. She doesn't want to get kidnapped or killed or raped, but she doesn't want to spend so much of her soul protecting herself from it that by the end there is no one to kill, just a pretty shell of a girl who used to sit on her front lawn when her father was just a governor; sit on her front lawn and break the law every single night. She can't do that anymore.  
  
All she wants, all she really wants is to have no one around her that she knows.   
  
All she wants is to get lost in a crowd. All she wants is to feel so perfectly alone without that constant hatred and fear under her bored expression that she's spent years perfecting because she doesn't want her father to know when she's afraid. It's not good for his health for her to be afraid, or alone, unprotected. So she does what she's told. He would say that it wasn't good for her health, either. That makes her smile.  
  
So today's headline is that Zoey Bartlet wants to be ignored. She wants to be alone in a huge group of people like she hasn't been since she was sixteen at a rock concert with Devin when her whole body had been filled with that golden, resounding emptiness. She had never felt so alone or so complete. Now she fells like she'll be spending the rest of her life trying to get that feeling back.   
  
All she wants to do is get lost in a crowd.   
  
fin 


End file.
